


fly me to the moon, let me play among the stars

by blueblueelectricblue



Series: a star spinning in orbit, lighting up the sky [11]
Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Diapers, M/M, Non-Sexual Age Play, Wetting
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-09-23
Updated: 2020-07-21
Packaged: 2020-10-27 02:13:38
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,087
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20752631
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/blueblueelectricblue/pseuds/blueblueelectricblue
Summary: A repository for all the little interludes that come to mind in between the bigger fics.





	1. only a paper moon sailing over a cardboard sea

Takes place sometime between [starlight, starbright, make everything all right](https://archiveofourown.org/works/18115220) and [thread my way through a string of stars](https://archiveofourown.org/works/18134534).

\--

Steve doesn’t know how it happened. He hasn’t had an especially difficult day. No long, boring meetings. No emergencies that involve putting on a uniform and jetting off somewhere. No speaking in front of a crowd. It’s just been an ordinary summer day, even though he’d gotten up a little earlier to start his run before dawn and avoid the worst of the heat and humidity. Steve and Bucky had enjoyed a pot of coffee on the balcony overlooking 16th Street NW, and after a shower, Steve had disappeared into the spare room to work on a painting he’s had in the works for a few weeks and Bucky had gone off to Whole Foods. Now it’s after lunch and Steve’s determined to finish a mandala page in one of the coloring books that are now scattered artfully across the coffee table. He’s got the book propped up on his knees from his perch on one end of the sofa while Bucky reads a novel out of the huge stack he’d brought home from the library yesterday.

So why has Steve spent the past hour fighting the urge to get up and find his pacifier?

There’s nothing _wrong_, exactly. He just — he really, really wants it, and he doesn’t know why, because he’s not even in a bad mood. Of course, not knowing what’s wrong is a surefire way to put Steve in a bad mood; he’s been working on it with his therapist, but being unable to articulate his feelings is a huge sticking point. And now he isn’t sure what to do.

Only…

Steve sneaks a glance over to see if Bucky’s paying attention.

He isn’t.

This is unsurprising; Bucky’s always tended to have a laser focus when it comes to reading. When they were kids, he always had something with him so that he’d never get bored — and always read it out loud to Steve when he’d get to “the good part,” much to Steve’s annoyance. At least he’s stopped doing that. It drove him _nuts_ to be interrupted every few minutes with, “Hey, hey, _listen_!” Bucky had even done that well into the war, prioritizing pulp noir magazines and paperback westerns over stuff like extra rations or cigarettes.

Steve waves a tentative hand to see if Bucky notices it out of his peripheral vision.

He doesn’t.

_Hmm._

Steve shifts his knees a little higher so that his coloring book covers more of his face.

Bucky still doesn’t react. He even reaches for his glass of water, takes a sip, and returns it to the side table without looking away from his book once.

_Perfect_, says Steve’s lizard brain (which has not progressed to the thinking that he could simply remove himself and do this in private, without so much worry of being caught). Verrrrrrrrrrry slowly, his left thumb creeps upward to brush against his lips. Once he’s sure Bucky’s still not looking, he wedges the tip into his mouth, just enough so that it could be played off as handling a troublesome hangnail if need be.

Bit by bit, the digit eventually makes its way inside Steve’s mouth, and he cannot _believe_ that he’s actually getting away with this. And oh, it _does _feel good. Not as good as his pacifier, which is smoother and softer — but Steve can feel the tension in his shoulders melting away as he sucks his thumb behind the coloring book he’s working on, which suddenly seems much more pleasurable than it had before, when he was just coloring for lack of anything better to do.

A few minutes later, Steve feels movement from the other end of the sofa and yanks his thumb out just in time, wiping it on his t-shirt.

“I’m gonna get some more water. You want anything?” Bucky asks him, stretching like a giant cat before he hauls himself to his feet.

Steve looks up from his coloring book, very, _very_ casually. Sooooo casually. And almost says, _Water, Daddy, please_, but he catches himself in time. “Water, D—_does _sound good, yeah, thanks.”

Bucky tilts his head in that way that means his curiosity has been piqued, and Steve’s heart leaps into his throat. “Lemon?”

“Nope.” Steve flashes Bucky his best casual-adult smile.

“Mmkay. I’ll be back.”

Steve manages to keep himself from putting his thumb back in his mouth until Bucky’s seated and comfortable once more, taking a sip of water every now and then. He keeps it up until he’s absolutely sure that Bucky’s engrossed in his novel once again, and then it’s back to thumb-sucking bliss as Steve works to finish his mandala. He’s still enjoying the book, but it’s starting to feel too complicated and restrictive — Steve wants to draw something. He’s not sure what that something is yet, but he can practically feel the crayon in his hand instead of this very nice and expensive (and grown-up) colored pencil, and colorful construction paper instead of the smooth pages of this book. He’s also becoming vaguely aware of a need to use the bathroom, but it can wait until he’s done with this.

“Hey, Steve?” Bucky asks after a while.

“Yeah?” Steve forgets to take the thumb out of his mouth — _whoops_ — and it comes out muffled. He’s slipping down into headspace, and hard. He pulls it free and then lowers the coloring book, trying to appear adult and unbothered.

Bucky is quite obviously not fooled. “What’s going on?”

“Huh?” Steve affects puzzlement as genuinely as he can manage.

(Bucky later tells him that he’s already a bad enough liar as an adult, but he’s next-level bad at it when he’s little. Steve gets mad about that, but then Bucky distracts him with a bagel. So it goes.)

“You’re fidgeting around so much that for a minute I thought the sofa was gonna take off. Are you okay?”

He was? Oh. Steve tries his casual-adult smile again. “I’m fine, Buck.”

“You sure?”

“Uh-huh.”

“You’re absolutely positive? You don’t have _anything_ you want to tell me?”

_Oh, shit._ Steve chews on his lip for a moment, trying to stall, because he’s not sure that he can keep this up much longer. “Ummmm…no?” he tries.

“So you _definitely_ don’t want this right now.” Bucky reaches into his hoodie pocket and produces Steve’s favorite pacifier, the one with foxes on it.

Steve starts to reach for it and then stops himself, flopping back against the cushions with a scowl. “I don’t need it. M’big.”

“Then how come your left thumb is all wet?”

Steve’s scowl deepens. He’d forgotten to wipe it off on his shirt like the last time.

“Stevie. Come on,” Bucky says. “Talk to me, buddy.”

“Don’t need it. M’big,” he mumbles, which is the last thing he should be saying if he wants to convince Bucky of that fact.

“See, the thing is, I don’t think that you _are_ very big right now.” Bucky’s dangling the pacifier from his pinky finger, letting it sway back and forth.

Steve couldn’t tear his gaze away from the paci if he tried. “Am too!”

“Mmhm.” Bucky stuffs it back into his pocket. “Okay, then.”

“_Daddyyyyyyy_. Give it _baaaaaaaaack_.” It comes out as a long whine, and Steve’s done for now, he just knows he is. There’s no explaining away _that_.

“Is this your way of admitting that you need some little time?”

He thinks very carefully about his answer, but by the time he’s done thinking, Steve only has the energy to slump down, even though his new sitting position makes him have to pee more than ever. It’s over. Daddy knows.

“Yah-huh,” he mutters finally.

“Do you need to go potty, Stevie?”

“…no?” Even little him recognizes how ridiculous that sounds, given that he’s squirming like mad.

“Yes, you do.” Daddy unfolds himself from the sofa, plucks the coloring book and pencil from Steve’s hand, and pulls Steve into a standing position seemingly all in one fluid motion.

“C’n do it _myself_, Daddy,” he says indignantly.

“Okay,” is all Daddy says, steering Steve into the bathroom in the hallway, because it’s closer than the one in their bedroom.

Steve actually is kinda glad that Daddy got him in here so fast, because by the time he’s finished fumbling his jeans and boxer shorts down, he’s already peeing and some’s gotten on his pants. _Oops._ He sighs in relief as he sits down and empties his bladder into the toilet.

“Hi,” Steve says, looking up at Daddy with his brightest, winningest smile once he’s done.

“Hey yourself.” Daddy flashes a grin at him.

“Paci?” He reaches out for it.

“What’s the magic word?” Daddy asks, making no move to reach into his pocket.

“Paci, _please_?”

“Sure thing, lovebug.” Daddy hands it to him. “How about we get you into some dry clothes and find a movie to watch?”

He doesn’t need to look into a mirror to know he’s gone crimson; Steve’s ears are all hot. “M’sorry. Didn’t mean to…” he mumbles through his pacifier.

“It’s not a big deal. Just a little accident, right?” Daddy bends down and kisses his cheek. “Nothing we can’t take care of together.”

“Together?”

“Sure. You pick out what you want to wear, and I help you get dressed.”

Steve frowns. “No diaper, Daddy.”

“We’ll see,” Daddy says, which almost never works in Steve’s favor, and picks up Steve’s wet clothes. “C’mon, let’s go into the bedroom so you’re not running around bottomless and getting your butt prints all over everything.”

“I don’t leave butt prints!” Steve squeaks, outraged.

“Sure, sure.” But Daddy’s laughing as he uses his metal arm to pick Steve up one-handed and carry him into the bedroom, where he tosses the clothes into the hamper for later. “You want teddy bears or planets and stars?”

“Neither,” he says, even though Steve very much would like to have been wearing a diaper with teddy bears on it earlier.

“Teddy bears or planets?”

Steve sighs; Daddy is the only person who can defeat him in stubbornness. “Teddy bears.”

“That’s my good boy.” Daddy rewards him with another kiss — this one to the forehead — and gets out the changing pad. “Lie down for me?”

Being called “good boy” almost always works on Steve and they both know it. So he submits to the diapering and chooses a pair of fleece pajama pants with Superman symbols printed all over to put on, and soon they’re on the sofa again. Steve ensconces himself firmly in Daddy’s lap, partly because he can and partly because he’d really like some cuddles right now.

“Hey, kiddo,” Daddy says as he flicks through the streaming queue for something they haven’t seen yet and that isn’t too scary or sad. “You know you don’t have to hide it from me, right? Being little?”

“Mmmph,” Steve answers, burying his face in Daddy’s neck.

“I’m serious, Stevie. You don’t have to pretend to be big when you aren’t.”

“I know.” He sighs. “Jus’…jus’ wanted to try, is all.”

“It’s okay to try if you’re not sure,” Daddy tells him. “But it’s also okay to tell me you don’t want to or can’t be big anymore.”

“What if s’too much?” Steve wants to know.

“What if what’s—oh,” Daddy says, half to himself. “You’re worried about asking me to be Daddy too much?”

He nods.

“I don’t think that’s gonna happen, Stevie. I _love_ being Daddy, anytime you want or need me to.”

Steve pulls his face away to look at him. “Really?” It’s almost too good to be true, so of course, he’s suspicious.

“Really,” Daddy confirms. “It makes me happy to take care of you, lovebug.”

“Oh.” Daddy _looks_ like he’s telling the truth. But he does tell the truth, Steve knows, and Daddy’s the only person in the world he trusts one hundred percent.

“So let me take care of you, huh?” Daddy smiles.

“Okay. But…” Steve takes a deep breath. “If s’ever too much, tell me?”

“I don’t think—”

“_Daddy_. Say you’ll tell me,” he demands. “You’re ‘portant too.”

“I will, Stevie.”

“Promise?”

“I promise.”

“Pinky swear promise?”

Daddy links their right pinky fingers together. “I pinky-swear promise that if I ever need to talk to you about how much we’re Daddy and Stevie, I will.”

Steve nods, satisfied by that. “Okay.”

“Okay?”

“Yah-huh. Can we watch _Moana _again?”

“Don’t you want to try something new?” Daddy asks.

“Nope.”

“You sure? There are a _lot _of Disney movies on here. We haven’t seen a lot of them.”

“_Moana_, Daddy.”

“…_Moana_ it is,” Daddy says, and presses the play button. “But I get to pick the next one.”

“Daddyyyyyy!”

"Oh, don't look at me in that tone of voice, Stevie."

"Mmmph."


	2. how high the moon - the darkest night would shine if you would come to me soon

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Natasha can't stop thinking about what she saw at Steve and Bucky's apartment a few weeks ago.
> 
> Takes place after [there is too much ease here; these stars treat me too well](https://archiveofourown.org/works/22576558).

The book of Pushkin fairy tales should have been enough to close the loop, but it isn’t.

Normally, this is not an issue for Natasha, putting something out of her brain once she wants it gone. And she _is_ done with it. Absolutely. There is nothing more that Natasha Romanoff would like to do than to forget what she saw at Steve and Bucky’s apartment a month ago. The expression on Steve’s face when he’d first caught sight of her twists at something deep inside her stomach when she remembers it — he’d been _afraid_ of her. She would love to erase that from her memory, but it keeps popping into her head at the worst, most inopportune times. Even seeing Steve on that first mission after his extended vacation, smiling at her as if nothing had happened, hasn’t gotten rid of it.

Why does she feel so _bad_?

This is uncomfortable, and she doesn’t know why. Not being able to identify her feelings is familiar to Natasha, having been so many different people over the years, her own personality tightly locked away to avoid interference with those new ones. After enough practice of shoving them all into the same compartment for so long, her feelings are just kind of one big tangled ball of yarn that she doesn’t have the patience to pick through and sort out.

It’s just…

She’d seen that expression on girls in the Red Room, assassins in training who slept handcuffed to their beds — to “build character,” as they were told once (and _only_ once; the KGB never explained itself twice). They’d startle too easily, jump when the door opened, their faces freezing in terror at being caught. Those little girls had not been…she doesn’t want to say strong enough, as that would be a character judgement she’s really in no position to make, as well as unkind. But some of them had broken nonetheless. It was as she had told Steve and Bucky. Some of them would regress, clutching at a scrap of cloth as if it could save them from their nightmares, rocking their small bodies with such vehemence that their heads might have flown off with the force of it had their necks not been so well-attached.

Natasha had tried to protect them, she really had. It wasn’t as if they could help it, after all. But after the first few times, it became apparent that her interference did not lessen the savagery of the punishments. Those girls would still disappear anyway, leaving the effluvia that had once been part of their lives stashed under urine-stained mattresses, the more useful things divided up among the rest of them. And after the first several times that Natasha herself had been caught trying to help these girls, the adults in charge eventually gave her a punishment that did stick — the details of which are too painful even now, two decades later, to remember on purpose.

So, she had given up.

Natasha is not proud of this.

That much, she _can_ identify.

She decides that to purge herself of these unwanted memories, she must confront them head-on. It takes only Incognito mode on the browser of her StarkPad (already modified for maximum encryption) and a few minutes to find online communities positively teeming with grown people who spend their free time acting like children — and, unexpectedly, the grown people who spend their free time taking care of these “children.” She hadn’t really thought about that aspect of it. Bucky taking care of Steve, well, that’s one thing. Actually, it’s _their_ thing and evidently has been for quite some time. It becomes apparent very quickly that some of these people are very much into it sexually, which Natasha understands in a way. Being in control of someone else or trusting another person to be in control can be very powerful aphrodisiacs. But, eventually bored with the repetition of their narratives, Natasha begins to focus on the other people, the ones for whom age play isn’t sexual, and is surprised by the diversity of viewpoints and personal anecdotes that she finds.

Before she knows it, she’s spent almost five hours clicking on link after link to message boards and WordPress blogs and Tumblr accounts, websites that host fiction and art, websites where specialty items can be bought and websites where those specialty items are reviewed, Discord chats, YouTube channels, subreddits. Natasha even clicks on a video or two, although she ignores the longer ones, as she does with most videos in general. The amount of information to process is absolutely _staggering_. There are so many more people who do this than she ever would have thought possible.

But now it’s dark and she’s hungry, and five hours of a deep dive into a fetish seems like enough for one day — possibly for a lifetime. A thought surfaces that perhaps the way Steve and Bucky play _does_ go a lot further than the snippet she’d seen, but Natasha shoves that one way down where it belongs, along with all her other idle speculations about friends’ and acquaintances’ private lives. She shuts down the browser, tosses the StarkPad onto the coffee table, and starts planning where she’d like to eat dinner instead.

That should be the end of it, and it is for a while. Natasha goes entire _weeks_ without thinking about this again. This suits her just fine, until the day she comes home aching and bruised from a short mission in Tallinn and catches herself wishing she had someone to cuddle with to take her mind off how shitty she feels. But she’s been hurt much worse than this before, she reminds herself, and goes for a very long, very hot shower.

Unfortunately for Natasha, however, now that she’s let the thought enter her mind, it takes up residence and stays there like a squatter hunkering down in an abandoned house. She tries to evict it, she really does, but that wish — that _hunger_, if she’s honest with herself — refuses to heed the many, many notices she nails to the front door. It goes on for a week until one morning, Natasha puts down her steaming mug of Russian caravan tea, sighs, and reaches for her tablet.

Within a few minutes, she’s created an account on the message board she liked the most during her last research mission. Not with her own name, location, or age, of course. She even chooses an icon that’s too generic for most people to notice. It isn’t like she’s never done this before, created a persona specifically for an online group, so it shouldn’t bother her that she feels the need to obfuscate her own identity for this too.

It does, though.

A _lot_.

Natasha closes the browser and opens Candy Crush instead.

The next morning, she logs in again.

“Love is for children,” she’d said once. But she would have said _anything_ to help Clint, wouldn’t she? Even if that meant pretending that she didn’t love him — didn’t love anyone, didn’t have the capacity for it, didn’t want it, and didn’t see the need for it. Not so hard, to pretend that for a few minutes.

It hadn’t worked anyway. For the first time in a very, very long time, Natasha’s extensive education in manipulation tactics failed her that day.

Ugh, why is she remembering that right now? Thinking about Loki still gives her the fucking creeps, even with him imprisoned worlds away and unable to do harm to anyone.

_You know why_, whispers a little voice inside her head. _You never stopped pretending even after you didn’t have to do it anymore to keep him safe._

Is wanting someone to cuddle with, to protect and keep warm, to spend time with — is that love?

Maybe.

_Or maybe you’re just pathetic_, says another, nastier voice. _Wah, wah, wah._ It sounds a lot like Yelena, who never helped anyone in her life, as far as Natasha knows. Not once in the Red Room did she show an ounce of kindness to those little broken girls. As a matter of fact, Natasha is fairly sure that Yelena is the reason she got caught helping them that last time.

“_Fuck_ you, Yelena,” Natasha says out loud, and mentally flicks the voice out of her head, out of the window, out of her life, like dandruff or a troublesome bug.

She’s still grinning at the idea of her former rival with giant multifaceted horse-fly eyes and a long proboscis as she starts browsing the message board, landing on a sub-section for new members to introduce themselves. It’s as good a place as any to start, Natasha figures, and she spends the next half-hour or so overthinking her post before finally just clicking the button out of the recognition that she’s _never_ going to be totally happy with it.

_Hi, everybody! _

_My name is Natalie, I’m 28, and I live in the Tri-State area. I’m in the security sector and like to work out in my spare time to balance out my terrible cooking. This is all new to me. I started looking around at age play stuff after learning about it from some friends, so I thought I’d join a group and see what it’s all about. I’m pretty sure I’m not little, but I’ve never really taken care of others, either, so idk. Just looking to find out more and (hopefully) make some new friends._

_Nice to meet you all!_

By the time she navigates back to her post about an hour later, she’s already received almost a dozen replies welcoming her to the group and has three private messages in her inbox. Natasha promptly ignores all three after opening them and finding variations on the same “Hey babygirl, I’ll be your daddy, and you can be my princess” cheesy pick-up bullshit — and they’re only the first of many, some distinctly not G-rated. _Those_ get their senders placed right on the block list, no passing Go, no collecting $200. It’s also sort of staggering how many PMs that don’t begin with men looking for female Littles begin with male Littles looking for female caregivers and not being polite about it in the least. Natasha starts to wonder if perhaps this was a mistake after all, even though users on the forums themselves more or less behave normally, but a few days later she receives this in her inbox from a user with a Powerpuff Girls avatar:

_Hey,_

_I was busy the last few days so I didn’t get the chance to message you before now, but I just wanted to tell you I’m pretty new here too and I don’t have a goddamn _clue_ what I’m doing. I’m glad there’s more than one of us, LOL. I could definitely use some new friends for sure. _

_Oh! I should probably tell you my name. It’s Madeleine. I’m also in the Tri-State Area! Queens, for me. I love it here – I moved here for college and never left. So many good restaurants just in this borough, let alone all the others! Except for Staten Island. Unless you’re from there, in which case, I guess I’m sorry either way. Anyway, lots of places to eat if you're a bad cook. ;)_

_Have you ever tried age play at all? I’ve tried but it’s kind of hard for me to get into it by myself. I feel like it’d be easier with someone else, or at least I might feel less silly._

_Hope to hear from you soon!_

Natasha is smiling before she even reaches the end of the message, and her index finger hovers over the screen only for a brief second before she clicks “Reply.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for your patience, all! I know it's been a minute since my last fic in this series.


End file.
